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OVERVIEW

Blogs give students an authentic reason to think through their writing because they know their audience can respond to them. In this lesson, students read blogs written by students their own age and learn to shape a well-thought-out response that addresses and answers the questions posed in the blog. Then, after reading, discussing, and deciding what makes a good blog entry or comment, students create their own response to a teacher-created blog entry to discuss the sequel possibilities of a favorite book.

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

The authors present recommendations for blogging with elementary students using the experiences of Karen Arrington, a veteran third-grade teacher in Texas, and her journey to teach substantial blog writing.

This article gives steps for teachers to follow in guiding students from writing blogs of little or no substance (penny comment) to writing blogs of substance (dollar comment) and includes a rubric to assess students' blog writing.

In this article, the author gives step-by-step instructions for setting up several types of blogs for classroom use. She goes beyond the traditional blogs and discusses four steps to expand student knowledge by incorporating higher order thinking (HOT) skills through the use of teacher-posted questions answered by students, which encourages students to think deeply about literature and formulate a response online.

Zawilinski provides a synthesis scaffolding figure in the article, demonstrating discussion questions to help incorporate both traditional reading and the higher order thinking skills required for online reading comprehension and evidence-based blog comments.